Antoni Clavé

Antoni Clavé (1913) was born in Barcelona. At the age of 13, he had to work and was hired in a fabric house for girdles and corsets. At the same time, he enrolled in evening classes at the Escuela de Artes y Officios Artisticos y Bellas Artes in Barcelona. Then he became an apprentice painter in the building trade, he was attracted by the manual side of the trade (whitewash, coatings, glues, and later preparation of colors). Clavé learned to handle brushes, to draw, the letter, the imitation wood. In 1932, he won second prize in a poster competition, and was hired by the company Cinematografica Nacional Española to make film posters on the facades of three cinemas in Barcelona. Clavé made a living from advertising and decorative work in which he used avant-garde experiments: collages of various materials, ropes, printed fabrics, corrugated cardboard, newspaper. In 1936, he created posters to galvanize the fighters of the Spanish Civil War. He fled the war and ended up in France in 1939, in Perpignan, where he was exhibited. Arriving in Paris, he met Picasso. He participated in a series of group exhibitions in Paris, in the provinces and abroad and created costumes and sets for ballets.